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Biography

Bill was born in Phoenix Arizona. Childhood musical training included trumpet, saxophone and piano. When he was thirteen his father, a medical doctor, moved the family to San Francisco and three years later the family moved to Los Angeles for Bill’s last year of high school. There he formed a band with several of his friends, with Bill playing keyboards. While he honed the band’s sound and recorded their demos, it took the band’s producer to encourage Bill to pursue the professional techniques that would become his life’s work.

Throughout college and law school Bill continued to write songs and play music, but his natural gifts in production and sound engineering eventually won the day. Bill worked with all four Beatles on the platinum Ringo solo records before he was 26. During the 70s, his punchy commercial sound, and especially his drum sounds, influenced many up and coming L.A. engineers.

Bill’s musical background has enabled easy communication with artists and musicians in the studio as a producer, engineer, and mixer. In a highly decorated career that spans four decades, he has hit gold or platinum payoffs for engineering such artists as Three Dog Night, Barbra Streisand, Rod Stewart, Mark Knopfler, Neil Diamond, Carly Simon, Chicago, Natalie Cole, Bette Midler, Barry Manilow, The Pointer Sisters, George Benson, Amy Grant, Michael Bolton, and Whitney Houston, including Whitney’s mega-single “I Will Always Love You.”

As a producer, Schnee mined precious metal on multiple projects with Huey Lewis and the News, Boz Scaggs, Pablo Cruise, Joe Sample, and the internationally renowned direct to disc recording for The Mastering Lab, Thelma Houston and Pressure Cooker.

In 1981 Bill opened his own recording facility. Schnee Studio boasts a large recording room with a very special acoustical sound that sets it apart from most large studios, a custom made console, custom tube mic pre-amps, and an extensive collection of vintage tube microphones. It is widely regarded as one of the best sounding recording studios in the world.

Bill has been Grammy-nominated 11 times for Best Engineered Recording and has won twice for Aja and Gaucho, both from Steely Dan. Those two multi-platinum releases add to a harvest of hits that includes over 85 gold records, 50 platinum projects and 50 top twenty singles. Schnee also has won an Emmy Award for Best Sound Mixing for a Variety Special - Natalie Cole’s live concert for PBS, and a Dove Award for the Promise Keepers’ album Raise The Standard.

Schnee has five children, and resides in Los Angeles with his wife, Sallie.


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